RETURN OF HAREMS

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 275, 16 August 1932, Page 7

RETURN OF HAREMS

Wish of Kemal Pasha’s Wife ATTACK ON HUSBAND There is said to be something like a revulsion on the part of Turkish women to their new freedom. Apparently the wholesale jettisoning of the harem which came with Kemal Pasha's up-to-date ideas of i five or six years ago have not turned out so well at the end of the five-year plan. It may be remembered that when Kemal Pasha, Turkey’s dictator, met the wealthiest heiress in Syria on the eve of his victorious campaign he fell in love and married her. Kemal, all for Occidental ideas in domestic administration, trained his wife to forgo everything old-fashioned Turkish, and live as they do in Paris. Her salon was conducted on Parisian lines and became the latest and most soughtafter rendezvous in the country. And, behold, Kemal Pasha was greatly pleased. Had he not conquered not only the country but its prejudices of a thousand years? Kemal proved how modern he was recently by divorcing his wealthy wife. She heaps seorn upon her husband and what he has done for Turkish women. “Our newly emancipated women!” she says. “Emancipated to adopt the worst of the Occident and east off scornfully the best that was in the Orient. “The only visible expression of their conception of the new life \is their exotic patronage of dance halls; dances that begin with supper and continue all night, even until nine o’clock on the following morning. “Social excesses, morbid and erratic, are making the Fatherland a land of brazen youth, a whole nation pleasurebent, insanely dancing toward the gates of hell. “Any protest, the slightest suggestion of sanity, the most indirect admonition to dignity,” the former Mrs. Kemal Pasha goes on, swinging the whip, “brings about the condemnation of the mob; all those who approve of such things are reactionaries and are silenced either by social ostracism, by violent hands, or even by the hangman. “Our respectable old Turks have lost their courage, and along with it they have lost their tongues. My former husband and a small section of noisy, servile functionaries have succeeded in deceiving a number of Turks into believing that the Ghazi is a veritable demigod whose coining our Prophet overlooked to mention in our Holy Book. “Although I have obeyed the orders of my former lord and husband to take up my residence in Constantinople, being a woman 1 feel that it is my natural privilege not to consent to have a padlock hung over my mouth-” Ah, what new Prophet will arise io bring back the peace of those dear old, silken, sweetly-scented harems? He’ll get a welcome!